Blame can be cast in war in Gaza

Leonard's 'Cuba Libre' is great

When I lived in Israel for five months in 1978-79, I noticed that, when the news came on the radio on the buses, everyone would get quiet and listen, because they were always concerned about an attack.

Soldiers in uniform joined the riders, both for transportation and security, because the buses brought people together in a confined space, and they had been the target of bombings by Palestinian terrorists. 

Despite their alertness, the Israelis were living ordinary lives and had become accustomed to the danger. More than once, I saw a soldier take off his or her rifle for comfort and put it up in the luggage rack.

I’ve been surprised to see the ambivalence of Americans about the current war in Israel and the bothsidesing of the news coverage. Television news shows regularly quote civilian casualty figures from Gaza provided by Hamas, an untrustworthy source.

The focus on civilian casualties in news reports is something I don’t recall from our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but reporters pass on the information they can get.

A narrative is forming with the destruction from Israeli bombing and swiftly rising Palestinian casualties — that the fight is unequal and unfair, innocent people are being killed and the war is morally wrong.

But if all this is true in Israel now, when has it not been? When has war been morally right?

Let’s consider World War II, since that is often held up, on the Allied side, as a righteous war. 

The United States entered the war after the Japanese surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval station, which killed 2.403 Americans, 68 of them civilians.

In the course of the war, the Allied bombing of Japanese cities killed between half a million and a million Japanese civilians. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima killed about 100,000 people and of Nagasaki, about 70,000. The firebombing of Tokyo, which reduced much of the city to ash, killed about 100,000 people.

The Allies bombed German cities relentlessly, often at night when any military targets could not be seen and with the express purpose of destroying German morale. From 1.1 million to 3.3 million German civilians were killed.

In most cases during World War II, civilians were not warned of bombings. No evacuation orders were given, no time allowed to leave the killing zone, no humanitarian cease-fires declared.

Civilian deaths worldwide during the war numbered 45 million, according to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, with fewer than a million of those in the United States and United Kingdom combined.

The Allies had good reason to fight. The war was justified. But morally right? Maybe from a broad perspective, but certainly not in its details.

I was talking with my dad about the Hamas terror attacks, and he quoted Shakespeare’s famous line about the uncontrollable nature of mass violence: “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

Hamas cried “Havoc!” with its unprovoked massacre of Israeli families in their homes, young adults at a music festival, people out in their cars, running errands.

Once the war began, Israel’s primary goal has been to win it. It is no surprise its efforts to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties have failed.

Israel didn’t choose this war, but, like the U.S. after Sept. 11, accepted that it must fight back. Perhaps it is because of the fiasco that the war in Afghanistan became — and the fiasco the war in Iraq always was — that many Americans have already turned against Israel’s war versus Hamas, after less than a month.

We can’t ask the impossible of the Israelis — to refrain from striking back against a provocation no country would ignore or to wage a war with kid gloves.

Regrettably, horribly and intentionally, the violence of war was unleashed on Oct. 7. The consequences are already terrible and will get worse. That is the fault of Hamas.

Readings

Speaking of war, I read “Cuba Libre” by Elmore Leonard, published in 1998 and concerning the lead-up to the Spanish-American war a century before. It’s a great book of historical fiction, a change from Leonard’s usual contemporary crime novels and more concerned with setting the scene (in Cuba) and establishing the historical context than any of his crime novels are. It resembles the work of Leonard’s early years, when he wrote exciting westerns (which, by the way, never make you cringe with dated cultural attitudes, the way, for example, the sexism of John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee novels do). No writer I can think of does action sequences with as much precision or as many thrills as Leonard, and that gift is amply demonstrated in “Cuba Libre,” especially in the climactic shootout in a cane field.